For what can be said poetically about the fate of the beloved body, the poets themselves must be appealed to. But that there is kinship between the body and the earth is literal truth. Of terrestrial particles it is wholly composed, and that they should be restored to the earth whence they were borrowed is natural and peaceful. Moreover, out of the same earth, and by aid of the very same particles, other helpful forms of life may arise; and though there may be no conscious unification or real identity, yet it is pardonable to associate, in an imaginative and poetic mood, the past and future forms assumed by the particles:-- "Lay her i' the earth;-- And from her fair and unpolluted flesh, May violets spring!" Quotations are hardly necessary to show that this idea runs through all poetry. An ancient variety is enshrined in the Hyacinthus and Adonis legends. From spilt blood an inscribed lily springs, in the one tale; and the other we may quote in Shakespeare's version (_Venus and Adonis_):-- "And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled, A purple flower sprung up chequered with white, Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood." So also Tennyson:-- "And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land." _In Memoriam_ We find the same idea again, I suppose, in the eastern original of Fitzgerald's well-known stanza:-- "And this delightful Herb whose tender Green Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean-- Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!" The soil of a garden is a veritable charnel-house of vegetable and animal matter, and from one point of view represents death and decay, but the coltsfoot covering an abandoned heap of refuse, or the briar growing amid ruin, shows that Nature only needs time to make it all beautiful again. Let us think of the body as transmuted, not as stored. The visible shape of the body was no accident, it corresponded to a reality, for it was caused by the indwelling vivifying essence; and affection entwines itself inevitably round not only the true personality of the departed, but round its material vehicle also--the sign and symbol of so much beauty, so much love. Symbols appeal to the heart of humanity, and anything cherished and honoured becomes in itself a thing of intrinsic value, which cannot be regarded with indifference. The old and tattered colours of a regiment, for which men have laid down their lives--though replaced perhaps by something newer and more durable--cannot be relegated to obscurity without a pang. And any sensitive or sympathetic person, contemplating such relics hereafter, may feel some echo of the feeling with which they were regarded, and may become acquainted with their history and the scenes through which they have passed. * * * * *